Equipment storage best practices

I'm sure this question has been asked ad nauseum, but I'll ask anyway.

A friend of mine recently gave me three plastic buckets and a bottling bucket which he has used with wild yeast, as well as some bottling equipment. He used Brett, Sacc, etc. They're relatively clean inside but they still smell kind of like sour beers. I've been storing them with my other non-wild beer equipment, in the same closet. Have I made a huge mistake? Is all of my equipment in danger of being infected with wild yeasts? Can these wild yeasts easily be transferred through the air, tainting anything on which the spores settle?

I'm also fermenting a stout in the same room and on the same night that I moved all of the new buckets into the room, I took a gravity reading on my stout. Might something have got into the stout? It's only been a week so I doubt it would be showing any signs so quickly, but I'm worried about it because I noticed that the airlock bubble rate seemed to have risen slightly. Obviously I'm not going to dump it out, I'm just looking for some experienced opinions about the matter.

So, how does everyone store their equipment? Do you segregate it? If it smells like brett, does it mean it's still dirty enough to spread the bug around?

thanks everybody...

i've kept all my sour/wild and clean stuff in the same closet (equipment and fermenters) for more than two years without problem (knock on wood).

If you're worried just sanitize the new buckets?

First, I'm doubtful there are any yeast still in the buckets as long as there is no sediment in it, yeast don't grow well on plastic with nothing to feed on.

Second, even if there was yeast growing in the bucket, there would have to be a decent amount of air movement for it to get anywhere else.

Third, even if it did somehow get into your other buckets, you would sterilize them before you used it, so it doesn't matter anyway!

I'm going to reinforce the above posts by adding that the increase bubbling in your stout is HIGHLY unlikely to be an infection of any sort.

Then I'm going to go another direction from the above posts and say that I don't store my sour beer equipment with my non-sour beer equipment....strikes me as a bad idea in general.

Quit worrying, you are fine.

Thanks a lot everybody, I appreciate the feedback. I, as I'm sure all of us, have read horror stories involving breweries and wineries being ruined after they were unable to get rid of a wild bug infestation. I'm now in the process of giving these buckets a very thorough cleaning and sanitizing. My friend wasn't very thorough! I will thereafter store them physically away from my other beer stuff. Hopefully you're all correct, and nothing unfortunate or irreversible has occurred.

jcsweat said:

Thanks a lot everybody, I appreciate the feedback. I, as I'm sure all of us, have read horror stories involving breweries and wineries being ruined after they were unable to get rid of a wild bug infestation.

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If a Commercial producer gets an infection, it can be a lot of product that is ruined, with the potential for bankruptcy. If you get an infection, it becomes an interesting experiment.

With decent sanitation procedures, the risk of cross infection is minimal. For Commercial producers, this risk is too high, but for us it's OK.